Best of Before 2022: Songs, YouTube, Tumblr
Happy holidays, Damespals! As 2022 winds down, we will continue our year-end wrap up of old things we enjoyed over the last twelve months. New is great, new is wonderful, but old is always there waiting to be discovered or rediscovered and our Best of The Year is always going to include things from the past. Please share your own best of’s with us! A whole new year awaits!
Dame Karen: Well, here we are, dragging the exhausted shells of our very selves over the 2022 finish line. Every moment is a gift, truly, but also gtfo, year. Thoughts?
Dame Sophie: I think on balance I’ve enjoyed 2022 a lot. I tested my hypothesis about being able to have a good time and earn a reasonable amount of money as a full-time freelancer, and it’s gone well! Here’s a link to my obligatory link to my ~online portfolio~. I’ll adjust some variables for next year, and see how we do. I’m also reflecting with genuine pleasure and pride on us at having not just revived this newsletter following a longer-than-anticipated hiatus, but imbued it with different…colors? That’s a slightly corny way to describe it, but that’s how they talk about it in music. It’s a richer experience for being new-to-me again, and for getting to work with you every week. It’s been, in the immortal words of Tom Tom Club, fun! Actual fun!! [The lyric is apparently “natural fun”, but DKNY and I have decided “actual fun” is better, actually] and readers can look forward to a celebratory and pleasing announcement early in the New Year, btw.
Dame Karen: Goddamnit Soph, you’re always so good at this stuff, especially when I’m grumping along. I, too, continue my full-time freelance situation (my website!), which included writing 128 (!) articles for Grunge dot com. Furthermore, I, too, am happy and proud with the work we did together this year and continue to be so grateful for our now decades-long friendship and creative partnership! I’m looking forward to the New Year and all it will bring to this very newsletter! It’s gonna be good! Get ready, Dames Nation!
Dame Sophie: I was put on this Earth to help grumps gently along! Everyone deserves a soft place to let their hearts land! We had such a good time enthusing about Psmith and Mike and Molly Keane last week that we decided to save our other vintage treasures that we enjoyed in 2022 to share this week. Whatcha got for Dames Nation today?
Dame Karen: I was slightly surprised, slightly embarrassed, and ultimately delighted in the end to learn that the song I played on Spotify most this year was the 2018 absolute banger “Jackie Chan” by Tiësto and Dzeko featuring Preme and Post Malone. I still don’t know who any of those people are outside of this song except for Post Malone, and I only know his hits. I should probably investigate because I love this song so much, but I kind of prefer to keep this perfect song my only contact. I first heard this song while pleasantly buzzed and lying in the sun on a plastic floatie in my friends’ pool with a small, matching floatie for my drink nearby. [Please always practice pool safety and make sure there are sober people around to supervise your nonsense and laugh incredulously when you insist this song be played one more time.]
This year was better than 2021 for me but I am still deeply, sloppily, and constantly mourning the loss of my best friend Alli, who died in September of 2021. I am still a bit of a mess and I remember feeling actual and uncomplicated joy for the first time in a long time while floating with my pals in a pool while a little out of my head and hearing this deeply catchy song. The lyrics are absurd and discuss, among other things, ordering sushi from Japan, livin’ life on fast forward but fuckin’ slow [ok, I just learned it’s “but we fuck in slo mo” — mmmkay], and taking an Uber out to Calabasas to dance dance dance. Could literally never be me but this song has been my constant, fun-loving companion and was also perhaps 33 percent responsible for the fact that I spent months training for and then ran an actual 5K a few weeks ago. I often rewarded myself for leaving the house and shuffling and sweating around the neighborhood by letting myself just listen to “Jackie Chan” the whole time. Plus there’s an extremely adorable Minecraft-themed video!
Dame Sophie: The calendar is famously inconsiderate about providing anything approaching a comforting shape or guidance around grief, which is itself a notoriously unpredictable little jerk of an emotional ouroboros. It also plays a long game, springing itself on unsuspecting mourners without so much as a courtesy tap on the shoulder. I’m so glad “Jackie Chan” (which I have now been listening to on a loop since you started writing about it; loving it) was there for you at the time you needed it! I can’t imagine that the fab four who wrote & recorded this cultural jewel had any notion that it would serve any loftier purpose than encouraging ass-shaking, but I bet they’d be happy to know it helped!
Dame Karen: I think so too; thanks, gents! I understand you also have a pre-2022 song to share with the class.
Dame Sophie: I do! So, Ol’ Finger On The Pulse Brookover finally started watching Peaky Blinders this year. The show’s theme song is the very moody and atmospheric Nick Cave song “Red Right Hand”, which is great on its own but not a “play on repeat” song for me. Well, it wasn’t, until some beautiful genius in our Music League put a cover of it on one of our playlists. A disco cover, by Holiday Sidewinder. As is the case for you with “Jackie Chan”, I know nothing else about the artist and her oeuvre, but the pairing of a beat and slinky vocal Donna Summer would have appreciated with the word of warning lyrics about Satan, probably, is delicious to mine ears. It’s been firmly lodged in my Spotify “On Repeat” playlist for months, currently nestled between Taylor Swift’s “Question…?” and “Follow Your Arrow” by Kacey Musgraves.
Dame Karen: It’s truly a gem! I don’t usually like covers of songs that wildly differ from the original (I know, what is my problem? It often feels like a cutesy parlor trick to me and I’m a sour, sour bitch, ok?) but this one is cool and I do love a frothy, infectious dance number about Satan!
Dame Sophie: Yeah! 4 on the 4 in the pale moonlight with an appendage that is possibly sentient & very sinister-ly active outside of its attachment to Satan’s body! I also often approach covers with cautious skepticism, too. A cutesy-poo cover is not my jam, but I love when an artist finds a totally different idiom that works with the song and then has the confidence to pull it off.
Dame Karen: I am laughing so hard at your perfect description of “Red Right Hand,” oh my goodness.
Dame Sophie: Thank you! I like to try to remind myself that Nick Cave is a real human being and is not restricted to the louche vampire daddy persona he has been going around as for all these decades. Don’t get me wrong, that persona is tremendous, and it works. And sure, his is Serious Music for Real Connoisseurs and Wim Wenders Soundtracks, but he’s just as goofy as the rest of us. His art is good enough to work in many idioms, and this song is so versatile that it’s blessed to be viable as a dancefloor jam. There is no higher achievement in pop! What’s next on your list of Cultural Highlights Not From 2022?
Dame Karen: I’ve been watching extremely poor quality video recordings of Sha Na Na on YouTube. Did you watch Sha Na Na as a kid? It stars Sha Na Na, of course, who famously appeared at Woodstock thanks to their friendship with Jimi Hendrix and were perhaps the first to kick off the ‘70’s craze for the ‘50s as seen on Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and of course Grease, in which Sha Na Na appear at the prom to sing “Hand Jive” and “Tears On My Pillow.”
Just a bunch of Columbia University a capella nerds who took on the persona of greaser street toughs who love singing passable versions of “Blue Moon” and “Mr. Bassman.” Lots of corny jokes that most dads would reject as too obvious, an endless stream of surprising guest stars (Zsa Zsa Gabor! The Ronettes! Rita Moreno! Della Reese!), and of course Jon “Bowzer” Bauman with his deep bass and constant flexing and mugging—I keep wondering if Bowser is actually incredibly hot?! I can’t tell anymore!
I used to watch this on Saturday and Sundays when there weren’t any cartoons on. Now I watch it when I can’t decide what to watch and just want to kick back, maybe do a little knitting, drink a little tea, and watch a bunch of slightly funny-looking dudes in gold lamé jumpsuits absolutely give their all to the kitchiest possible rendition of “Tell Laura I Love Her.”
Dame Sophie: A fun fact about my early childhood TV consumption habits that I think explains a great deal about who I became as a person is that in the brief window of my being an only child, my hippie parents succeeded in convincing my guileless ass that the only TV shows that existed outside of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers were The Muppet Show, M*A*S*H, and Sha Na Na. I haven’t watched it at all since 1981 or so, but they’re firmly lodged in my heart & the recesses of my mind. Bowser, like Hawkeye Pierce, is indeed hot.
Dame Karen: That’s a pretty great television line up, I gotta say! Ok, cool, and so we end the year secure in the knowledge that Bowzer is hot.
Dame Sophie: We, the true and only arbiters of hotness, have declared it so! *gavel smash*
Dame Karen: Tell me about this made-up film you love, please.
Dame Sophie: With pleasure! Though I must first offer the caveat that I am juuuust aware of it; the true expert in my social circle is my 17 year-old, who is perhaps a tad more extremely online than I am, especially on Tumblr, where it all started. Now, we all know of the legendary run Martin Scorsese furnished us with in the 1970s. Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, etc. Film scholars of 2022, many of whom maintain Tumblrs to this day, unearthed a long-lost treasure from this period, the 1973 mafia epic Goncharov.
Dame Karen: Ok, yes, finally, a Goncharov explainer for meeeeeeee! I just became aware and haven’t dug in at all. GO ON!
Dame Sophie: Let us heap Criterion Collection blessings upon the shining head of Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, undisputed champion of keeping an eye out for and furnishing us with Everything You Didn’t Even Know You Wanted To Know About Delightfully Weird Internet Culture content all the time. Her explainer at the Daily Dot is enormously helpful if you don’t have an Internet Teen handy to explain things as they develop in real time. Technically this film doesn’t exist, but also it 100% exists. There’s a trailer; a score; another trailer for the film’s 20th anniversary re-release. Rich cultural breadcrumbs are everywhere on the fan-oriented sites that are the digital home of various obsessions and hyperfixations, in particular, Tumblr, and Archive of our Own (where there are now 347 works of Goncharov fanfiction available — as of this writing, 15 are crossover fics with other fandoms including The Untitled Goose Game, Back To the Future, and The Sandman! Just try to tell me super-creative Internet culture isn’t thriving!). I want to be clear that I pay the slightest attention to what’s going on in this fandom because I do not have the time to indulge in a deep dive, but even just nibbling around the edges, it fills me with such joy. This little corner of the Internet, giddily gaslighting itself into shipping not just fictional characters but fictional characters that technically don’t exist (OR DO THEY??), is creating public, collaborative art. For fun. In the Year Of Our What The Hell Now? 2022. As Twitter burns, Tumblr rises like a phoenix, restored to much of its former glory. It’s so wholesome?!
Dame Karen: Truly a gift to us all during these trying times — fly, Tumblr, fly!
Dame Sophie: I’m hard pressed to think of a more joyful note to accompany closing out 2022.
Dames Nation, we hope that what remains of your year will be merry and bright, and would love to know what cultural treasures got you through, lit up your life, and brought you whatever feelings-type experiences you needed most this year. Sound off in the comments, or just hit reply if you prefer to keep it between us. See you in 2023!